An Immense Landscape

 "I picture the vast realm
of the sciences as an
immense landscape scattered
with patches of dark and light.
The goal towards which
we must work is either to
extend the boundaries of
the patches of light, or
to increase their number.
One of these tasks falls
to the creative genius;
the other requires a
sort of sagacity
combined with
perfectionism."

- Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
Thoughts on the Interpretation of
Nature and Other Philosophical Works

Stirrings of the Soul

"The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things."

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

Middle Ground

"We now know that complexity arises in a middle ground—often at the order–disorder border. Natural systems that evolve with and learn from interaction with their immediate environment exhibit both structural order and dynamical chaos. Order is the foundation of communication between elements at any level of organization, whether that refers to a population of neurons, bees or humans. For an organism order is the distillation of regularities abstracted from observations. An organism’s very form is a functional manifestation of its ancestor’s evolutionary and its own developmental memories.

A completely ordered universe, however, would be dead. Chaos is necessary for life. Behavioural diversity, to take an example, is fundamental to an organism’s survival. No organism can model the environment in its entirety. Approximation becomes essential to any system with finite resources. Chaos, as we now understand it, is the dynamical mechanism by which nature develops constrained and useful randomness. From it follow diversity and the ability to anticipate the uncertain future. 

There is a tendency, whose laws we are beginning to comprehend, for natural systems to balance order and chaos, to move to the interface between predictability and uncertainty. The result is increased structural complexity. This often appears as a change in a system’s intrinsic computational capability. The present state of evolutionary progress indicates that one needs to go even further and postulate a force that drives in time towards successively more sophisticated and qualitatively different intrinsic computation. We can look back to times in which there were no systems that attempted to model themselves, as we do now. This is certainly one of the outstanding puzzles: how can lifeless and disorganized matter exhibit such a drive? The question goes to the heart of many disciplines, ranging from philosophy and cognitive science to evolutionary and developmental biology and particle astrophysics. The dynamics of chaos, the appearance of pattern and organization, and the complexity quantified by computation will be inseparable components in its resolution."

- James P. Crutchfield (1955 - )
Between order and chaos

Imagination

"We know,
but cannot grasp,
that above and below,
beyond the limits of
perception or imagination,
thousands of millions of
simultaneous transformations
are at work,
interlinked like
a musical score by
mathematical counterpoint
...a symphony
...but we lack the
ears to hear it."

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Plural Realities

"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness."

- Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982)

Subliminal Knowledge

 "Can we perceive those
inorganic beings,
don Juan?" I asked.
"We certainly can," he replied.
"Sorcerers do it at will.
Average people do it,
but they don't realize that
they're doing it because
they are not conscious of the
existence of a twin world.
When they think of a twin world,
they enter into all kinds
of mental masturbation,
but it has never occurred
to them that their fantasies
have their origin in a
subliminal knowledge that
all of us have:
that we are not alone."

- Carlos Castaneda (1925 - 1998)
The Active Side of Infinity

Enfoldment

 "The essential feature

in quantum interconnectedness

is that the whole universe

is enfolded in everything,

and that each thing
is enfolded in the whole."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)